The Aarhus University Department of Bioscience in Denmark and Landau’s Institute for Environmental Sciences jointly offer a MSc thesis to study the long-term effect of global change on the exposure and dietary pathways of metals in the Norwegian tawny owl Strix aluco.

The Norwegian tawny owl Strix aluco (source: Wikipedia, image by jimfbleak)

The student will have access to a unique archive of 1,200 feathers from a Norwegian nest box population, collected from 1986 to the present day. A complete dataset on feather metal concentrations is already available. Biogeochemical methods such as stable isotope analysis will be used to quantify individual dietary compositions. This will allow to ultimately support the hypothesis that ongoing global change has been impacting the exposure to metals in the here studied Norwegian tawny owl population, both directly through changing environmental sources and indirectly through changing dietary sources.

The student will have the opportunity of a research visit at Aarhus University and the University of Antwerp, working closely together with specialists in wildlife ecotoxicology, biogeochemistry and climate science.

Interested? For more details, contact Dr. Igor Eulaers (ie@bios.au.dk) or Dr. Jochen Zubrod (zubrod@uni-landau.de).